Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge

By jorm – January 23, 2012

Last week, I was heavily involved in one of the largest news stories of the week, in which we (the community of the English Wikipedia) chose to black out Wikipedia for a full day in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA).

You might have seen it mentioned on various news sites.

I am very proud of our accomplishment. I want to write a bit how this went down, behind the scenes, and how I came up with the “black out” design, something I am extremely proud of.

On the afternoon of Friday the 13th, I attended my first “SOPA War Room” meeting. At this point in time, it was clear that the community wanted to do something about SOPA and PIPA. We (the Foundation) felt that it was time to start the gears turning about enacting whatever the protest action was going to be.

Left to Right: Jay Walsh, Matthew Roth, Sue Gardner, Myself, Michelle Paulson. Photo by Victor Grigas

At this point in time, we were fairly certain that it was going to be a “black out.” Reading the tea leaves, we also assumed that this black out was going to be localized to the United States only, and that the community was going to vote for it to be a “soft” black out – one where users would be able to continue to Wikipedia after viewing the black out screen.

I was brought into the discussion because the screens needed to be designed and implemented, and, well, my title is “Senior Designer.” I was tasked with coming up with two design variants and to publish them before midnight that evening (which gave me roughly three hours time, once I was able to work on them).

During this meeting, I walked everyone though the ramifications of the design so that we were all on the same page. I knew that since time was tight I was going to have to “get it in one” and we weren’t going to be able to do a lot of futzing with it.

I recommended that we go with something that was simple and had a “statesman” like feel to it rather than something over-the-top (which I referred to as the “dragonslayer” approach).

It was about an hour after this that I got nervous. “Jellyfish in my belly” nervous, because I realized that this was going to be an historic event, and really, how often does anyone design something specifically to be historic?

So. I armed myself with the following thoughts:

The screen must be iconic. This image will be used in screen shots in the media and elsewhere.
The screen must be simple. While the issues presented are complex, they must be boiled down to easy-to-understand concepts, with room for expansion.
The screen must be symbolic. This is potentially a historical event.

And the following design considerations:

The Wikipedia “puzzle globe” image is a “busy” icon, and not appropriate for the type of statement required.
Simplicity over complexity.
Seriousness over frivolity.
The Wikipedia wordmark was deemed important to include.

My design philosophy is summed up as “More Kirk, less Spock.” I felt that, for this image, anything that could be deleted from the design should be.

First mockup, light version

I knew that I wanted to use the “W” logo image because I think it’s far more “statesman” than the Puzzle Globe’s “hero” posture, so that was easy. I wanted to also imply strength, weight, and purpose, and I felt that the idea of “Wikipedia standing tall” had a lot of power.

The first image I came up with was a “white” version. It was really just a really large “W” logo, in a dark grey, and a block of text on a translucent white box set to overlay it. It didn’t feel right, though, and in a fit of inspiration I added the shadow to it.

First mockup, dark version.

This was okay; it was getting somewhere. I then started working on a “dark” counterpart. To my mind, SOPA and PIPA represented an “encroaching darkness” and I felt that could be established with a simple gradient.

I then sent the images around to the team for comments. We played around with the sample language a bit and I published them to the discussion on the English Wikipedia around 11:30 pm, about two and a half hours after I started.

We figured that the community would come to a vague consensus as to which direction they wanted to go within about twelve hours: do we want to go with a “light” theme or a “dark” theme was the real question.

The next morning I woke up to see that the “dark” image was leading in the polls by a factor of around 50 to 1. So, that answered that question pretty clearly, and we (Ryan Kaldari and I) began the technical implementation.

The black out screen was actually implemented through the technology we use for our fundraising banners (it’s called “CentralNotice”). We chose this method because at the time we were still assuming that it was going to be an interstitial image (so we had to load the “real” Wikipedia behind the scenes) and that it was going to be targeted to the USA (the banner system has some sophisticated Geolocation technology).

I did most of the initial html and css coding on a static page (Neil Kandalgaonkar would later do the implementation inside of CentralNotice entirely in Javascript) while Ryan worked on creating an extension to handle congressional representative lookups. We had a passable prototype by the end of day, Sunday.

I made some tweaks to the image design along the way – tweaks that I thought were minor at the time but ended up having a massive impact to the overall mood. I raised the W logo from its shadow, so that it floated, and I changed the gradient to be radial rather than linear.

Monday was a work holiday, but the Anti-SOPA team came into the office anyway. This was when the bulk of the congressional lookup feature was coded (though the superheroes I work with were coding it right up to the launch on Tuesday evening).

At four o’clock in the afternoon on Monday the consensus discussion regarding the protest was closed and we were given our marching orders: a global, “hard” blackout, 24 hours, beginning at midnight EST on Wednesday the 18th (which meant we had to launch at 9 PM local on Tuesday evening).

Monday evening’s war room time was spent on messaging: Sue Gardner wrote a blog post explaining what we were going to do and why. It was published and linked from a banner on Wikipedia and. . . instantly crashed the blog server.

Ryan Lane spent an hour heroically battling the performance issues on that server, upgrading it, adding caches, and generally hyperdriving its performance. This was a weird thing: no blog post had ever gotten more than a few hundred comments before but this one picked up a couple thousand within an hour. It took four of us operating at once to moderate the comments they were coming in so fast (as of this writing, there are almost 13,000 comments on that post).

The decision for the black out to be global and “hard” were problems for us. At the time that the decision was handed down, we had been committed to our technology choices (the train had actually left the station on Friday, to be honest). Blacking out the mobile gateway was a non-starter: that technology doesn’t do CentralNotice at all and the development time required was deemed too much.

We also made a call that there should be ways for people to get at the data if they absolutely needed to, which is why we designed in some ways to get around the black out screen (disabling Javascript, pressed ESC before it loaded, and appending ?banner=none were all ways to do this).

I’ve been asked a lot why we didn’t just point a redirect to a single “black out” screen and the answer to that is, frankly, it would have annihilated our search rankings. We felt that doing so would actually be a disservice to The Mission. Google suggested that most sites just return “503″ error codes to avoid this, but Wikipedia isn’t “most sites”: we are indexed differently (Google polls the recent changes feed). We were specifically told not to do the “503″ trick.

Tuesday was a blur of meetings. Meetings about messaging. Meetings about press coverage. We wrote and rewrote the text of the landing page about fifty times. Everyone who could program was working on getting the congressional lookup system working. We ran into problem after problem and worked through them. Text was being edited all the way up to the launch moment.

I was plugged into the projector. At nine pm I hit “refresh”, and this is what happened.

I work with some superheroes.

Hey, it's on the Daily Show!

The next twenty-four hours were also a blur. Some people thought we’d just take the day off but that was one of the more busy days of my life – because we had to turn the site back on. I worked out a “breaking dawn” design that we switched in (you can see it here) which I think works very well.

In the end, we managed to change minds. We flooded the internet with our message and people listened. We melted the phone lines on Capitol Hill. We struck a blow for the free and open internet.

And that’s something, I think.

The entire event was exhausting, exhilarating, and elating. I felt closer to The Mission in those hours than I ever have.

I had lunch today with a friend of mine who used to work for the Foundation and she told me that she’d never been prouder of us and what we do than that moment. It was a good thing to hear, and a good thing to feel.

I absolutely love this job. I want to say thank you to everyone on the planet for giving me the opportunity to do the Good Work. I am filled with gratitude, knowing that this work makes a difference.

Posted in Creative, Media, Politics, Topical. Tagged with black out, sopa, wikimedia, wikipedia.

3 comments

So I Made Chili

By jorm – November 26, 2011

The other day, I had Thanksgiving dinner in Santa Cruz with Stacey’s extended family, who I really like a lot. While we were there, Stacey suggested that I should make chili soonish – it being that time of year and all.

So I did the math and figured that Saturday would be the best day for it, and since it’s my “birthday weekend” I figured what the hell, people could come over. So I made a pot of chili.

I don’t want to toot my own horn too much (actually, I do), but I make a seriously bad-ass chili. I have modified and played with the recipe for about fifteen years now, and each batch is unique.

Now I’m going to tell you how I (currently) make it. I’m not good with writing recipes, so bear with me. I’ll write for those who don’t know from cooking.

The first lesson of Chili Club is that real chili does not contain beans. Beans are a filler. Use hamburger for filler.

I call this my “Vegetarian Chili” because it’s made of vegetarians.

Here’s what you need:

A stock pot. If you don’t have one, modify the ingredients to size.
A cast iron pan. Mine is over 150 years old, but if you don’t have that, you don’t have that.
A chef’s knife
A metal spatula
A cutting board
A whisk
3 cans tomato paste
3 (large) cans crushed tomatoes
3 pounds of stew meat.
3 pounds of hamburger.
2 onions.
2 to 3 green bell peppers
2 to 3 yellow bell peppers
2 to 3 red bell peppers
A batch of green onion
Powdered habanero. WARNING: handle with extreme care
Cayanne pepper
Ancho chilis
Various other chili powders, seriously, just use to taste
Sriracha (rooster sauce)
Brown sugar
A jar of powdered sipping chocolate (I use Theo’s spicy chocolate)
Soy sauce

Okay. Open the tomato paste cans and spoon them out into the pot. For each can of tomato paste, add three cans of water. Whisk the shit out of this until it’s a smooth slurry. Dump in the cans of crushed tomatoes.

Put this bad boy on the stove and turn the heat on. Just go right to simmer; you don’t need to start it boiling immediately.

Now, open your packs of stew meat. Usually this stuff isn’t very high quality, so you’re better off going directly to a butcher. Either way, you’ll probably have to slice up the meat into more bite-sized chunks.

Once you’ve done that, you need to brown the meat. So heat up the frying pan to about medium heat and dump a handful of meat into it. Keep turning it over until it’s “browned” on all sides (there’s no red left). Then dump the batch into the pot and stir.

Do this until there’s no more stew meat.

Now, you’re going to do the same to your hamburger. Brown it in the skillet. Keep chopping at it with your spatula so that it gets grainy and exactly the opposite of a hamburger patty. Dump that in the pot, too, and repeat until no more hamburger.

Now you’re going to add in a bunch of flavors all in a group:

Chili powders, especially cayenne. Do this sparingly; you keep adding them over time.
A half-cup of soy sauce.
A handful of chili peppers. They’ll simmer out.
A couple solid squirts of rooster sauce.

The pot should be “popping” now. This is cool. Just stir it.

Now go back to your cutting board and chop up those bell peppers and onions (make sure to peel the onions first; you might want to just chop off the ends of everything, too).

Chop the peppers up until the parts are about the size of your fingernails. Do this by slicing each pepper in half, and then taking each half and cutting it several times horizontally. Then chop the horizontal slices, etc.

The onions – you can sort of cleaver them. Onions naturally fall apart; I like to have the individual “leafs” be about the size of my last thumb joint.

Dump all this into the pot. Stir it.

Okay. Now, go play a video game for an hour. Stir the pot every fifteen minutes.

After an hour, come back. Now you’re going to enter the SERIOUSLY I AM NOT KIDDING THIS IS DANGEROUS part of the operation: powdered habanero. You may have difficulty obtaining this ingredient. I keep mine in a jar, hidden where no one can accidentally open it.

I’m not kidding. This stuff will seriously mess you up if you breathe it, or it gets on things, or pretty much anything. If you have latex gloves you may want to use them. Put your shirt over your mouth while you goof with this stuff.

One – and I mean one teaspoon of the stuff. Gently drop it in, stir it up.

Let the pot simmer for another hour, stirring every fifteen minutes or so.

Now for the sweet: about a quarter cup of brown sugar and a quarter cup of the chocolate. Stir it in. Let simmer for ten minutes.

(From now on you’ll absolutely have to keep stirring it every 10 to 15 minutes. If you don’t, the sugar will burn on the bottom of the pot. This is bad; you don’t want it to happen.)

Taste the chili. Get a chunk of stew meat, some tomatoes, etc. Eat a couple spoonfuls. It should not be noticeably spicy until about the third bite, and even then not too serious (the sugar and chocolate changes the flavors). If it’s too tame, add more cayenne. Too hot? A bit more chocolate or sugar.

Do this over and over again for the next three hours. This entire dish takes about four to five hours to be “good”. The longer it simmers, the better it is.

When it comes time to serve, take those green onions (you didn’t add them already, did you?) and chop them up. Fill a bowl with the chili and sprinkle the chopped green onions on top.

Enjoy.

Posted in Creative, Life, Whatever. Tagged with food.

1 comment

Slayer: Learning to take Action

By jorm – October 8, 2011

This is a story about learning to take action.

Yesterday was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the release of Slayer’s seminal assault on humanity, Reign in Blood. It is a perfect album.

In October of 1986 I was fourteen years old. I was one of the mice in the walls. I played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons and Nintendo. I played with the idea of “rebellion.”

A few months before the release of Reign in Blood I’d been in a rather vicious and bloody fist fight with a boy named Shane. Like me, Shane was a small boy. In the grand monkey-house that is part and parcel to being a “teenager,” he needed to prove his mettle and show that he was stronger than someone else. He picked me.

He spread untrue rumors about me. Rumors that I was honor-bound to answer. In those days, in that town, in those schools: slander was settled in trial-by-combat. I lost the fight and because of that the rumors became “truth”. I would never, ever become one of the “cool kids”.

I was a loser. A sad-sack. Pathetic.

Fucking Shane.

Memory:

On the day Reign in Blood was released for sale, Jason, Jake, Aaron and I (we Mice) went to buy a copy immediately after the final school bell. We walked under the 8th street viaduct to the magical land of “Downtown.” Once there, we hooked a right on 4th avenue directly to Davidson’s Music and dropped our combined allowance on the counter. It was a Tuesday; I remember because Tuesdays were always when the new music came out.

Why launch day? Well, we had literally ruined our copies of their previous album, Hell Awaits. Obviously listening to the tapes but also trying to play them backwards to understand the “demon speech” that overlays the first track.

To my nascent, outcast self, Hell Awaits spoke of power. A power that wouldn’t push me out, one that would embrace me, would welcome me. Having access to this didn’t make me any different – I was still pathetic – but at least I could feel a little less so.

(Spoiler: the whole demonic “sine-YOJH, sine-YOJH, sine-YOJH … waaaKUUUMBAAACHH!” bit? It’s “Join us, join us, join us, Welcome back.”)

We bought the tape and then hurried back to Aaron’s house to slot it into his father’s stereo. Jason cranked up the volume and pressed “play.” We suddenly found ourselves thrown against the wall by the aggression of the album’s first track, Angel of Death.

This. . . this. This was a different sound altogether. This was a wall of clean, focused fury. It was a half-hour of Liquid Bad-Ass, poured into a shot glass and hammered back with a chaser of “Because FUCK YOU, that’s why.”

A half an hour later, when the stereo clicked dry, there was something new, something different in my brain. A pregnant thought that perhaps I wasn’t destined to always be a victim. That I was allowed to be angry. That sometimes the anger was justified.

That just because I felt like I was pathetic did not mean that I actually was.

I had to express this feeling.

Because FUCK YOU. That’s why.

I was compelled (by Satan, probably) to obtain a t-shirt. I tried three record stores before I struck gold at the mall. It was a glorious tabard with the “sword logo” on the front and a venue list on the back, splattered with a blood-red “Do you want to die?”.

The next day, wearing it to school, I felt like a bad-ass. All goddamned day.

Because FUCK YOU.

In the play of my life I had decided to become a writer instead of only an actor.

In years since, I have come to understand that my impression of who I was and the impression that my classmates had about me were radically different. I saw myself as an undesired outcast. Because of this (because FUCK YOU), I got deeper into art and music. Into writing, reading, and games. Most of the time I just wanted to be left alone and not randomly punched in the nuts by someone for a laugh.

About a month ago I was in West Virginia and went to my 20th high school reunion. This was a bit of an eye-opening moment for me because it turned out that my classmates hadn’t seen me as a loser or pathetic. Quite the opposite: I was told a couple times that I had been admired for just doing what I wanted (because FUCK YOU) regardless of what anyone thought.

I had become the rebel because I thought I would never be allowed into the mainstream.

Strange how our perception of reality shapes the objective reality.

Some days I get lost in the existential questions surrounding this. Questions about nature and nurture. They mix my brain up. I lose focus and understanding of my identity.

Then I listen to Slayer and the doors in my brain get kicked down with the hard reality that it doesn’t fucking matter because FUCK YOU, that’s why.

Here’s what I learned from Reign in Blood:

The most perfect enemy of the pathetic is action.

When you don’t know which door to take, say “fuck it” and kick one of them – any of them – open.

Kick these doors with purpose and fury.

Be the writer.

Twenty-five years later, when I find myself feeling closest to my nostalgic roots, I still wear a “Reign in Blood” tour t-shirt.

I still feel like a bad-ass when doing so.

Posted in Life, Topical. Tagged with slayer.

2 comments

Tubin’

By jorm – September 25, 2011

Today, several of my friends and I spent the day lazily floating down the American River in Sacramento. It was a blast. I highly recommend you try it.

This event is called tubing.

The basics of “tubing” are thus: You get a floatation vehicle (usually an innertube or innertube-like thinger), go to a spot at the top of the river, get in the water, and float down to an exit point. You spend between four and five hours on the water, in the sun, talking, relaxing, and (usually) drinking.

I smoke cigars every now and then.

What you do is this:

Get a group of friends. Five to ten is probably optimal. Pick two points on a river: a entry point and an exit point. They should be about ten miles apart on the river (not by road). Everyone meets at the exit point and parks their cars.

At this point you’re going to leave about half of the cars behind. All of your people get into half of the vehicles, carrying all your equipment, and drive to the entry point and park.

At this point you all inflate your flotation vehicles, get in the water, and have an awesome four or five hours.

When you get out at the exit point, you get in the cars left behind and drive back to the entry point. Then you split to your cars and go home. Sometimes you have to leave people behind at the exit point and then pick them up.

I’ve done this a pack of times now and each event is different. I always learn some new tricks and tips about what makes the difference between an afternoon that is excellent and a one that is a disaster.

I am now going to share my knowledge with you, so that you need not repeat our mistakes.

1) Never Split the Party. – Seriously. With a group larger than 5, you may find this to be a problem: people drift apart, get split by currents and such. This is not a problem as long as you can see each other, but if your group fragments to the point where you can’t easily get back together, you’ll need to reconnect.

This is most easily accomplished by beaching. The group in the front should beach to the shore and wait for everyone else.

This idea leads us to…

1a) Never Get Out of the Boat Alone. – If it starts to get cold, or you move too slow and night begins to fall, make your decisions as a group. If a few people get out of the water early, the party gets split. I have personal experience about how this is a Bad Idea, with Bad Results. Either everyone gets out of the water or no one does.

2) Cans Only. No Bottles. – Beer is awesome. We love beer. You must only purchase beer in cans because, simply, bottle break. They break, and they get on the river bottom, and then you might step on them. Or they might slice open your floatation vehicle.

Get yourself a mesh sack. Put your full cans into it and let it drag in the water. The river will keep them cold.

When you have empties, crush them. Keep your empties in a different sack – you can leave this one out of water if you want. There’s two reasons for this: a) Crushed cans can possibly puncture your fresh brews, and b) You’ll sometimes find people who want your empties to recycle.

3) No liquor. No Psychedelics. Don’t get Fucked Up. – Stay with beer. You need to not get totally hammered. There may be moments where you have to think quickly (like, oh, you’re about to float into a downed tree). Liquor will dehydrate you pretty quickly and gets you more drunk faster. You need to stay hydrated in the sun, so drink light beers: pilsners, Coronas, etc.

As far as psychedelics go, ohman. Having some people in your group who are totally fucked up this way turns them into Persons of High Maintenance (see below).

4) Avoid Persons of High Maintenance. – This is a personality thing, and something you’ll need to know about your people. You want to avoid bringing your friends along who are High Maintenance. The ones that require a shit-ton of attention and help for everything. You know what I mean: people who require others to inflate their floatation vehicles, or are totally incompetent at paddling, or whatever. Everyone needs to be reasonably capable of taking care of themselves.

This extends. When you get on the river, sometimes it will be cold, or slow, or there may be other problems encountered. The best people take charge about this; most bear these problems well, but there are some people who will complain endlessly. These people are also Persons of High Maintenance, because they demand that the River bend to them.

Further, inviting your friends who get aggressive when they get intoxicated should be avoided as well. My friend Cary related an anecdote to me about this. He once went out with some friends, who invited friends, And one of these guys got super drunk really early on – and then started shooting the other people in their flotilla in the face with a super-soaker at point-blank range. After about an hour of this, Cary just cut the douchebag loose from the flotilla.

This actually leads to…

5) Have a Super-Soaker. – While on the river, you will encounter other parties. Most of them will be very relaxed and friendly. However, from time to time, you’ll encounter a pack of douchaholics. They will have super soakers. And they will possibly want to start a marine battle with you. You must have at least one weapon. This is a deterrant. You shouldn’t have to use it; just be willing to. No one wants to get nailed with one, so just showing your teeth will be sufficient.

6) Never Tie Your Flotilla. – You’re on the river. You’re having a great time. You want to hang out with your friends with very little effort. Everyone’s got a rope, right? Let’s just tie in to each other.

Bad Idea.

We lost a raft today because of this, and some people almost got injured – possibly killed.

At the top, I said, “You can tie up but make sure that those ties can come undone at a moment’s notice.” After a while, we forgot that this was important and just tied on. Towards the end of our trip, we ended up floating into a submerged tree. Josh was instantly capsized and only survived by grabbing onto the “beer wheel”, and Val and Randor’s floatation vehicle was annihilated on the tree stump.

Because we were tied.

This tragedy would have been avoided if we could have split apart.

Here’s how to do it correctly: Tie multiple ropes to your flotation vehicle. Then hand those ropes to others. They hold on to them with their hands, or drape them around things, or whatever. You really only need loose cohesion. The ability to instantly separate is of paramount importance.

7) Have Paddles. – So, yeah. Paddles. You don’t really need a long paddle, but having one (or preferably two) paddle blades is essential.

There will be times when you will drift too close to the shore and are in danger of running into draping trees. You’ll need to get out towards the center in a hurry, and it’s just not going to happen if you’re in a Flotilla Formation and everyone is just cupping water.

There are few things more enjoyable than hitting a “rapids” area while in Flotilla Formation. And then, there’s few things lamer than getting becalmed or trapped in the eddy that occurs right after those rapids. You need to be able to get out of those places and back into the current.

8) Get Good River Shoes. – You can’t do this barefoot. You’ll be stepping on rocks and sludge and slime and other bad things. Find some footwear that you can get wet and not worry about – but most importantly will not come off. Flip-flops are not acceptable unless they also tie around your ankles.

I personally use a pair of low-top Converse Chucks. Surfing footwear works well, too.

9) Stash a Towel, a Change of Clothes and a Hoodie at the Exit Point. – You’re leaving cars there already. Pick one, and everyone dumps a change of dry clothes, a towel, and a hoodie there. The hoodie is super-important, even if it’s in the hottest part of summer: the water is cold. You will be chilled getting out of it. You should also store your “dry” shoes here: no one wants to drive home with wet feet.

10) Stash of Food at the Exit Point. – Even if you bring hella sandwiches on the float, you’re going to get out of the water feeling pretty hungry. This is a good time for some granola bars. It’s especially important if you have to leave people at the Exit while others go to get the cars.

11) Everyone Buys a Dry Sack. – Well. Not “everyone” but have a two or three. These can be purchased at any camping goods store. Get a bunch of ziplock baggies. Put all car keys in ziplocks, and then all phones. Put this stuff in the dry sack.

12) Split the Car Keys. And Cash. – You should have a stash of cash money. Enough for cab fare to either the entrance or the exit point. Double this amount and split it among your dry sacks. Same with car keys: don’t put all your eggs in one basket. It’s possible you could lose a dry sack, so you can’t let yourselves become completely screwed.

Aside from all of this, always be aware of your surroundings.

Posted in Life, Whatever. Tagged with awesome.

3 comments

Evil Minds that Plot Destruction

By jorm – September 11, 2011

Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses
Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerers of death’s construction
In the fields the bodies burning
As the war machine keeps turning
Death and hatred to mankind
Poisoning their brainwashed minds

The Twenty-First Century was born in fire and baptized with the blood of innocents.

Ten years ago I stood in front of a television and watched a pair of magnificent buildings fall. As the picture of the events became clearer over the next several hours, as we learned for certain that it was an attack, that it was terrorism, a cold and creeping dread settled in my bones and a single song started playing in my mind, over and over again.

The opening refrain of Black Sabbath’s War Pigs perfectly captured what I knew to be true then and what I knew would become truth in the future:

We would be going to war and we were not going to stop.

I knew it would be an awful, awful thing – that hundreds of thousands of innocent people were going to be buried over the event.

I was glad of it. From the depths of my grief and rage, I wanted paybacks. We all did.

I hated those men. I wanted raise them from the dead just to vaporize them again and again and again and again.

We all did.

And so we went to war. We woke up The Bloodthirster and let it out of its cage to go play in the desert. We were lied to and lied to ourselves in return. We lied to ourselves about our motives, about our foreign policy, about our core values as human beings.

I say “We” and I mean it. We, as a people, cannot foist the responsibility of these atrocities on anyone except ourselves. All the events that followed – the wars, the civilian deaths, the prisons, the tortures, the treacheries:

We allowed that to happen.

The Twenty-First Century is ten years old today and its formative years were composed of religious extremism, the erosion of civil liberties, political fear-mongering, and the dissolution of many of the things that our forefathers fought and died for.

We have taught our children to fear.

We’re no more or less safe than we were on September 10th, 2001.

I don’t want to live in fear.

I don’t know the way forward. We certainly can’t go back but I think we, as a people, need to take a long, hard look at how we got to this point. We are addicted to the rage and the fear.

Ozzy and Tony wrote the song as being topical to the Vietnam War. Their intent was to illustrate how the process of war never changes, how the result is always the same, and the blood left on a battlefield simply serves to slick the wheels for the next outing of the War Machine.

We can break this cycle. We have to. We have to stop thinking from a mindset of xenophobia and start thinking from one of welcoming and tolerance.

Because if we don’t, this entire cycle will begin again. And again. And again. And again.

Posted in Life, Topical. Tagged with 9/11, black sabbath.

1 comment

REAMDE: A Virus

By jorm – September 6, 2011

REAMDE is the latest novel by the epic-level Nerd Paragon Neal Stephenson.

It is not his best work but I daresay it is his most engaging.

Mr. Stephenson and I share a mutual friend. He came over on Thursday evening and thunked a hefty tome down on my dining room table. It had this printed on the bottom: “Advanced Reader’s Copy • Not For Sale”. I had written a review of his previous book; would I like to write one for this?

Well. Of course. Neal is and has been one of my favorite authors, starting back in 1992 when my friend Dave lent me his near-mint copy of one of the Nerd Bibles: Snow Crash.

The plot of REAMDE (and I will continue to use all-caps for the title) is both simple and complex at the same time. There are many characters with many stories, and all of them weave around and through each other. As is typical of Stephenson’s writing, the threads seem at times to be unrelated and only at the climax do they bind together again to display a cohesive tapestry to the reader.

REAMDE is a story that combines massively multiplayer video games, the Russian mafia, Chinese gold farmers, draft-dodging drug smugglers and Al Queda terrorists in a post-Osama world.

The title of the book comes from a gold farmer’s virus that has infected thousands of players of World of Warcraft-style video game. The virus works like this: if you are infected, it will encrypt the contents of your hard-drive with a key that only the makers of REAMDE possess. The victim must then pay a ransom – in the game – of 1,000 gold pieces (about seventy-five real dollars value) in order to get the decrypt key (and thus recover their files).

Purely by accident, The Wrong Kind of People get their shit trapped by this and the virus locks up some super-valuable data. The Wrong Kind of People have Muscle of the ex-Spetsnaz variety. Hijinks (read: murders) ensue and the stakes, in a series of co-incidences, keep growing higher and higher.

Neal’s strongest characters arise when he writes in “time-local” settings and the cast of REAMDE is as well-written as it is diverse. We travel the globe with this yarn and accumulate characters from several nationalities, ethnicities, creeds, and color while doing so.

The cast is also large – on the order of six or seven main characters and about ten secondaries. In the hands of a lesser writer this could easily have fallen apart but Stephenson manages to split the party up in such a manner that the reader need only concentrate on three or four at a time.

REAMDE hits the ground around page fifty and maintains a relentless pace thereafter. The final act ran a bit too long for my taste but this is mostly an artifact of the huge cast size: every thread must be tied off in some way or another.

Reading this book made me want to write games again.

Oh, yeah. What do I think is his best work? The Diamond Age, natch.

Posted in Reviews. Tagged with books.

3 comments

A Review: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

By jorm – September 1, 2011

Let’s talk about Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Here’s a nutshell review: Deus Ex: Human Revolution is all the good bits of the original Deus Ex without all the tedious and masturbatory pseudo-intellectualism.

But let’s dig deeper.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a game by Eidos: Montreal. It’s a modern action role-playing game, very similar to the popular Mass Effect series (which is produced by my former masters). It could be easy to call DE:HR a “Mass Effect” clone, but to do so implies an ignorance as to the title’s history.

So let’s pause and talk about that for a moment.

1999 and 2000 were watershed years for the action RPG genre, giving us first the seminal System Shock 2 (my ten year retrospective) and then Deus Ex itself, designed by Warren Spector (who also gave birth to such gems as the Toon and Spelljammer pen-and-paper RPG games). This is to say nothing of other games that walked in the edge of the genre (such as Half-Life).

The original Deus Ex, set in the year 2052, was a fantabulous game for its time.

To be sure, it had some really hokey shit going on. For instance, the future’s equivalent to Homeland Security was headquartered in a secret bunker beneath Ellis Island. The overall plot (the world is really a crazed knot of intrigue and backstabbing) was told and not shown (via found ebooks that you could read, each holding several thousand words of rather boring text). It gets further confusing because once you get a grasp on the conspiracy (which looks to be a war between various “Illuminati” factions) the introduce some motherfuckin’ aliens up in the mix and everything gets even more confusing.

However, the gameplay was amazing. It centered around stealth and conversations and had an open-world exploration quality that was new and exciting. Further, it had some absolutely excellent mission set pieces (such as the airport and airplane levels, or even the Statue of Liberty).

It spawned a less-than-stellar sequel set in 2072, Deus Ex: Invisible War. Invisible War possessed an even more confusing plot (especially since the end of the first game left the world in fairly dire straits), and even more volumes of text that had to be collected and read just to understand wtf was going on. DE:IW ended with what can only be called an “apocalypse” so there really can’t be further games after that.

Enter our current game, which is actually a prequel, and is set in the year 2027.

I want to step off the game review for a moment and talk about “cyborgization” as a whole in games and in literature. I’ve played various “cyber” games on and off since the 1980s, starting with Cyberpunk 2013 (later Cyberpunk 2020). Even back in 1988, I laughed at the idea that humankind would be able and willing to undergo voluntary limb replacement and cyborgization within twenty years.

It’s 2011 now. While we actually have crude bionic hands that can actually be controlled by thought, this kind of technology is at least twenty years out and will be another twenty before it’s cheap enough to be affordable as “voluntary augmentation.”

It’s like the mythical flying car. Futurists have been saying that we’re only 10 years away from them for over sixty years. So I put this stuff into the same bucket as I do goddamned mecha and consciousness downloads: neat fictions, but entirely implausible.

But let’s just say we eat this Red Pill, accept this fiction, and see how far the rabbit hole goes.*

Human Revolution is a grand-old Deus Ex game. There’s a rich back story filled with intrigue and betrayal told to you via ebooks and hacked email accounts, but the back story never feels overbearing and I was able to follow it without referencing a handwritten notebook. The main plot is relatively simple: avenge and/or find your kidnapped girlfriend.

The interface and gameplay have been polished to a shine. I absolutely love the art direction (which can be summed up as “everything glitters with gold”). The voice talent is strong (though after a while I could only hear Clint Eastwood’s voice when the main character speaks).

One of the things Human Revolution does well are conversations. At many points you will find yourself having to convince someone of something, and the way its handled is well-done. The outcome of conversations will affect everything in the game afterwards, too, which is a nice touch (sometimes people come back to haunt or help you). Cybernetic upgrades can help you read and influence people through subtle application of pheromones. This game mechanic was well-done, too.

Human Revolution manages to marry 3rd person “cover” mechanics to 1st person combat very well. I’ve not seen a stealth game that pulls it off this well (not even Arkham Asylum or Assassin’s Creed 2).

The city hub maps are delightfully crafted and full of life and detail. They never feel small, even though my game designer’s mind knows that they actually are. The future vision of Shanghai is absolutely phenomenal (but again, one of those things that certainly can’t happen in sixteen years – you’ll understand when you see it).

However, there aren’t any individual “mission” maps that stand out in my mind as being particularly awesome – there’s nothing that approaches Deus Ex’s “airplane” level, for instance. Most of these maps boil down to a practiced “you’re in a warehouse and need to escape” look-and-feel, which makes me sad because there’s so much that could be done there.

There’s another thing: the names, man. The names. Every name is symbolic in some way. Your character is supposed to be the progenitor of a new kind of augmentation and is named “Adam”. There’s an AI you’ll meet named Eliza. I found emails from a hacker named Kevin Mitnick. There are also names that will be familiar to fans of the original games.

The game ate my brain. If you’re into this kind of thing, it will eat yours, too.

I say check it out because you know there’s going to be another sequel.

(And now I want to figure out how I can play the original again.)

* Yes, there really is a Wikipedia article dedicated simply to the Red and Blue pills.

Posted in Reviews. Tagged with games.

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Haifa and Wikimania

By jorm – August 9, 2011

Last week, I went to Haifa, Israel, to attend the Wikimania 2011 conference.

It was a very good conference, but my experience this year was very different from last year’s, in Poland. Mostly this was because my profile as an employee of the Foundation has elevated significantly (people know to come talk to me about things) but also there is some minor celebrity from my banner ad being successful.

I gave two talks (“Encouraging Participation”, “Identity, Reputation, and Gratitude”) and sat on a panel (“Ask the Developers”). All were well-received.

I was particularly nervous about my solo talk, “Identity, Reputation, and Gratitude” (slides). This talk was (in my opinion) an important one, since it focused on the why we are going to add social features to Wikipedia and why that will not turn us into Facebook. It’s a delicate line but the changes are essential to the long-term survival of the projects.

I made a metric boatload of new friends. I am continually astonished at the work we as a collective are actually doing and how many people in the world are dedicated to The Mission. There is a visceral thrill involved with it, with recognizing those of like-minds, and how our shared enthusiasms bridge language gaps.

We did a lot of partying together. In a way, that’s a lot of what this conference is about: strengthening our ties to each other, reinforcing trust and friendships that can last thousands of miles apart.

Several of us were “boots on the ground” in Haifa a couple days before the conference started itself, so we were able to suss out local bars. Surprisingly, Haifa has a thing for Irish bars and whiskeys, which, if you know me, is right up my alley. I’m even the mayor of one of them on Foursquare.

A great memory for me was this:

On the first night of the conference, I and my immediate crew descended on one of the bars we liked. There were maybe fifteen of us. I told them that we’d need several tables and the manager was concerned: he had a group of 40 college students coming, so he wasn’t sure where he could put us. Also, he wanted to “open tables” (single tabs) for us.

I told him that the single tab thing wasn’t happening. If you’ve ever been to dinner where one guy buys 50 dollars in drinks and then only drops twenty into the pot, you’ll know why. I said we’d just buy drinks from the bar, individually. He was (rightly) concerned about tips for the waitresses, and I told him that we’d take care of that.

He wasn’t having any of it. I’m not a big guy on haggling, but the Israelis are, so I set to. Here’s what I did:

First, I told everyone, loudly, “hold on! We might be leaving!”

Then I said to the manager: “Listen, I’ve got maybe 150 people about to show up here. They’ll be spending thousands of shekels. Thousands. Now, if your establishment can’t help us, we can just go across the street.” At that point, another group of about twenty people walked in, and I got to say “Hold on, guys! We may not be staying.”

He spent exactly 60 seconds on the phone with the owner before telling me that they absolutely could do business with us, and that we could basically take over the bar. I guess that the idea of having 40 college students who nurse one beer and eat all the peanuts was less attractive than a plethora of adult conference goers who like expensive whiskey.

Conservative estimates put us as having dropped over 30,000 shekels that night, so they were very happy. I then went about making sure that everyone dropped 5 or 10 shekels into a tip jar that we gave to the waitresses. There were probably 200 people in and out of there over the whole night.

The final night the chaps from Wikimedia Israel threw us a party on the beach. It was, in a word, epic. Immediately upon arrival I took off my shoes, rolled up my pants, and walked out into the Mediterranean Sea before spending the next half hour trying to get everyone else to do so. We watched the sun go down and reflected upon The Mission and our new friendships and how we’re all working towards Something Great.

I want to comment for a moment about the heat.

Two weeks ago I was in West Virginia to visit my family and attend my 20th high school reunion. There, it was an oppressive 106 degrees fahrenheit and 100% humidity. Haifa, by comparison, was a chilly 86 degrees and 75% humidity.

Israel felt hotter.

We found this sandwich shop near the venue that sold icee-style drinks: grape and orange. The “purple drank” flavor became a staple of our continued battle with the heat. We even made up new lyrics to Purple Rain to go along with it.

The night of the closing party, I asked one of the local bartenders, “How is it that it gets hotter at night, when the sun is down, than during the day?” She shrugged and said, “Is Israel.” This became an in-joke.

The return journey was a chore. We left the hotel at around 6:00 PM Israeli local time and then I finally got home at around 9:00 PM Israeli local time the next day. Twelve hour flight from Tel Aviv to Philadelphia? Check. Baby that cried for all twelve hours? Check.

Here’s some food for thought: Ben Gurion Internation Airport in Tel Aviv is widely regarded as the most secure airport in the world. There were no porn-o-trons. And I didn’t have to take my shoes off.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tagged with wikimania, wikimedia, work.

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Captain America, FUCK YEAH.

By jorm – July 26, 2011

Over the past week, I found myself in West Virginia to visit my family and attend my (twentieth!) high school reunion. While there, Stacey and I managed to catch a matinee showing of Captain America: The First Avenger.

Holy fuck was this filled with awesome.

“Kicking the ever-living shit out of Nazi ass” has always been a favorite fantasy of mine, and Captain America delivers that in spades.

Well. Sort of. There are Nazis, but the main enemy is Hydra, one of Hitler’s secondary research arms. What would happen if there were super-humans during World War II? Well. That’s what we get to find out.

There’s a strange mirror here. We all know that the Axis powers were the ones concerned with “ubermensch” – supermen – and tried to find ways to create them. In the movie, the Allies succeed where the Nazis fail.

The story concerns itself with one Steve Rogers. Steve is a 90 pound weakling from Brooklyn. He has asthma and a host of other ailments that prevent him from protecting his professed love: America. He continually gets given the boot whenever he enlists to fight overseas.

However, Steve is a plucky duck – rather unique, in fact. He never quits. He hates bullies. He is willing to lay his life down, however meagre it is, to save others – and demonstrates this.

All of which proves that he is The One.

Steve is given a Serum by a Scientist. It makes him stronger. Faster. Taller. Muscles throb under his skin afterwards.

And then he goes out to kick an unholy amount of Nazi^H^H^H^HHydra ass. That’s pretty much what this movie is about: ass kicking in the 1940s. Captain America is to “ass kicking” as The Wire is to “thoughtful examination about the war on drugs”.

Being a comics nerd, I am familiar with Cap’s origin and all the weird (and campy) details involved (such as him clocking Hitler in the jaw on the cover of his first issue). The movie pays homage where needed and does its level-best to incorporate some of the more difficult elements into its baseline (such as Bucky). It is a solid story, well told.

We saw it in 3D, so the colors were muted. See it in 2D.

Posted in Reviews. Tagged with movies.

3 comments

Straight Razor Shaving

By jorm – July 5, 2011

Attention, Dudes! This post is for you.

(You ladies? This post won’t be for you. Sorry about that. If you read on, you’ll understand why, but the impatient among you can quit right now. This isn’t a sexism thing, mind you. Just, you know. Well. Read on, I guess.)

So, dudes! You know that weird, wiry hair that grows out of your face? The stuff that you scrape away every other day or so? We’re gonna talk about what we’ve been doing wrong and how to fix that shit.

Many of you were taught to shave with a disposable razor by your fathers. You learned the correct way to lather cream on your face, how not to nick your skin, and how to gently scrape your beards away (always with the edge up and down, never side to side).

(Others of you, like me, didn’t get taught dick by your fathers about this process and suffered many years of styptic pencils and bits of toilet paper on your face.)

We all have weird issues with this whole “shaving” thing. I, personally, have this irritatingly placed mole just below my lower lip. Every goddamned time I shaved with cream I would nick the top off it into the bin, resulting in a couple hours worth of bloodletting. Eventually, I gave up on the whole “shaving cream” thing: I discovered that I could “dry” shave in front of a mirror directly out of the shower. I could see what I was doing, at least.

This led to me shaving in the shower, looking into a mirror suction-cupped onto the wall or shower door.

Enter the real problem, and where we are all doing it wrong.

We’re using those goddamned disposable razor blades.

Holy smokes. Those things are a monster of excess: A standard 3 blade razor costs about 10 bucks for the handle and one blade cartridge – that you’re supposed to ditch after three or four runs. A replacement package of 5 cartridges will run you about 30 bucks. This is insane: 20 shavings at 30 bucks is over a dollar a pop.

They’re bleeding us. Literally.

There are solutions to this problem, my friends!

The first one (and the one I don’t recommend) is called stropping. When you shave, the razor blade get . . . fuzzy. Little bits of the edge start going the opposite way from the pointy end. This makes the blade dull and more likely to nick you. Now, with a straight razor, you’d get yourself a strip of leather and run the razor across it, sharp edge backwards. The harsh surface of the leather will cause those fuzzy bits to switch back towards the pointy end.

“But Jorm,” you say, “you can’t do that with a safety razor! I don’t even have a strip of leather!”

“Crap”, I respond. “You got your forearm, son.”

Before you shave, take your safety razor and run it backwards along the length of your inside forearm. Do this about 10 times. It won’t hurt, I promise. Apply even pressure, almost like you were shaving your face, only in reverse. Ten times, and bam! Your little safety razor is stropped! Just like new, compadre.

I once used the same cartridge for eight months this way. I’m not joking, my friend. This is basic physics.

You’re welcome!

The second option, though, is the manly option. And that option is to just ditch all this mamby-pamby five-blades-with-a-strip shit and just buy yourself a goddamned straight razor and learn to use the thing.

It’s not hard. On the internets you can even find beginner kits – razor handles that will accept “disposable” blades (read: razor blades). Even if you stay with this, it’s super cheap: you can buy a pack of 100 blades for five bucks.

“But wait,” you say. “Shaving with a straight razor is dangerous! I could kill myself!”

Really? You’re allowed to play with scissors, right? I mean, you’re not seven years old. Learning to shave with a straight razor is easy. You hold it to your skin at a 20 degree angle and scrape forward. Do it slowly, small scritches at first. Maybe only do your sideburns for a while until you get the feel of it before you go full-on to the rest of your face.

There are a zillion internet tutorials about this.

Here’s what you do: lay out for a shower mirror (five bucks), a training handle (15 bucks), and a pack of blades (five bucks). Don’t use cream. Shave every couple days depending on your growth speed.

Straight razor shaves are closer than anything you’ve experienced. I promise you, you won’t be disappointed.

I’m not lying to you. I have a hell of a mustache to maintain.

(I, uh, do not recommend grooming your nether regions with a straight razor. Keep your disposable safety razors for that.)

Posted in Life, Whatever. Tagged with razor, shaving.

4 comments

Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge

So I Made Chili

Slayer: Learning to take Action

Tubin’

Evil Minds that Plot Destruction

REAMDE: A Virus

A Review: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Haifa and Wikimania

Captain America, FUCK YEAH.

Straight Razor Shaving

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